I think it’s a somewhat credible theory I’ve heard that a large portion of our “defense” spending goes towards larger and larger bribes to countries around the world either to not go to war or to maintain trade relations with the United States in order to maintain U.S. hegemony.

Hold up. I see three NATO countries in that top-spending list, yet Trump is crying that they don’t spend enough? It seems, as everyone seems to agree, that the problem is the US spends way too much. But since US “defense” spending is an obvious grift to shift public money to private pockets this isn’t too surprising.

Who knows how much of that money is completely wasted. Remember pizzas for $500 USD, or whatever the exact price was?

Stop calling it defense.

Socialize (military) spending, vassalize smaller countries, privatize wealth, that’s the american way of running businesses

2 Trillions that could have been invested in education, science and welfare instead.

Depends on how you define “necessary”.

More than actual use, the American military is about “implied threat”

“Do as we say, or else”.

Its always been that way. Without the implied threat, the other world leaders would have told cheetolini to pound sand on day one.

its “necessary” once you figure out that when people get tired of the complications caused by it, they are willing to use the military to quash discent on behalf of the elite class, to maintain control.

all i know is, i play warhammer total war 3 a lot. and when my skavens are starving and start an uprising, i just send a lord with his army to quash the discenters, and maintain control.

simple as.

Isn’t it “War Spending” now?

“War” spending, now.

Edit: I am slow

One thing to keep in mind is that defense spending tends to rely heavily on local provision. You generally can’t just import soldiers, and keeping military-industrial supply chains local or at minimum trusted is also a requirement. So using something like a PPP-adjusted figure rather than a nominal figure is probably going to be closer to what you’re actually buying, and that rather considerably diminishes the difference.

kagis for someone discussing the matter

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/chinas-military-rise-comparative-military-spending-china-and-us

Given current data, China’s military expenditure in PPP terms is estimated to be $541 billion, or 59% of US spending, and its equipment levels are only 42% of US levels. Comparing trends over time shows that the US has matched China in recent years, albeit at the cost of a much higher defence burden.

The underlying mechanism here is that China has a lot of people who will work for rather-lower wages than in the US, which means that each nominal dollar China budgets for their military can buy them more military capacity than in the US, via taking advantage of those lower wages.

If the US had a large supply of workers willing to work at Chinese wages, and could use them to drive its military and military-industrial system, that wouldn’t be a factor.

And most of it goes either into super inflated prices for the most silly things, or into projects that no one can talk about and are unsupervised.

Winning

at least half goes to defense contractors.